Chips without a public toolchain are not worth investing your time in. It is bad enough if your work is tied to specific hardware for which there may at some point not be a replacement but to not even have the toolchain under your control makes it a negative.
Seriously Intel is already struggling after buying Nervana.
I went to their shing dig and they were working their butt off to wow the developers who were invited. When I asked for hard number they were very mum about that and very evasive.
The timeline for Nervana chip have been always seemingly in this mystical horizon that is never solidified to a real date but over yonder.
Google is going to pull this crap? They got better software expertise than Intel though they may be able to do it. But after that fiasco with Angular 1 to 2 I wouldn't trust Google with any early version number.
Nervana had a lot of other issues. It was trying to produce an ASIC with 50 employees. When they got aquired by Intel the first step they had to tackle was hiring the engineers necessary to actually produce an ASIC which innevitably slows down production, and then on top of that they got caught in the Intel 10nm bear trap.
AI is too powerful a technology to let it out there to the masses. People might use it for killer drones after all. All users of AI must be tightly controlled and registered with the authorities!
This is the problem with certain kinds of technology that are bumping up against the edge of innovation. They're too powerful and if these technologies get in the hands of the DIY set, governments will lose control so they have to DRM and regulate everything. Heck, it's a problem with old technology. Many weapons aren't that complicated technologically, but their production and use are tightly regulated.
Edit: I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just deconstructing their though process for tight control over AI tech going forward.
For some reason drones are perceived to be completely different from all weapons that have existed before them. Those killer drones have existed for half a century. They are called missiles. Also the reason why UAV based fighter jets are not viable is because a cruise missile can be launched from 1000 miles away and for the cost of a global hawk you can send out more than a hundred of them.
If terrorists have access to explosives then it doesn't matter how they deliver them because most lucrative targets (= lots of people in a small area) are stationary or predictable. A simple bagpack filled with explosives was more than enough to injure hundreds of people during the Boston Marathon.
You can make an unguided, explosive-filled rocket that can harm people for cheap from scrap. Insurgents throughout the world have done so for the past 40 years. That may not be as simple as Add To Cart, but it is well within the economic means of almost everyone.
So the idea is to let Google do the right thing? Or Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, ..., etc?
The "right thing to do" is to open up these technologies, so that everyone can harness its power, not hide them under the wing and discretion of the (already too) powerful.
Except technology is amoral, it's up to the engineer and others to use it ethically and morally. The internet can organize hate groups and it can organize voters. smh.
